One of These Nights
by Meredith T. Tasaki
Summary: Stars and cherry blossoms and, for once, peace. What sort of idiot would Josh have to be to let this go?...


One of These Nights  
  
Rating: PG-13 Disclaimer: I don't own The West Wing, or the Eagles song "One of These Nights". I'll give you all a couple seconds to recover from your shock. Ha ha. (embarassed smile)  
  
Summary: Stars and cherry blossoms and, for once, peace. What sort of idiot would Josh have to be to let this go?...  
  
Apology: "One of These Nights" was floating around in my head, with other esoteric bits of information. It actually turned out better than I thought it would, though... The staying up, writing it 'till midnight actually helped this time... embarassed smile  
"Where are you going, where have you been" is actually the title of a Joyce Carol Oates short story. Because I don't want anyone haranguing me for not knowing. Not that I think you would, of course.  
Maybe on the melodramatic side; again, I apologise. (sheepish smile)  
  
(-)  
  
I've been searching for the daughter of the devil himself,  
I've been searching for an angel in white...  
  
(-)  
  
Strangely, maybe unnaturally, calm, Josh thought. That's how you would describe it.  
  
It wasn't very often Josh thought about how to describe things... He'd never done it. It wasn't his style.  
  
Until he'd met Sam.  
  
The things you sort of pick up as you tumble through this life, the phrases, the mannerisms, the esoteric information...  
  
Speaking of esoteric information...  
  
For some reason, he couldn't keep himself from calling these trees "sakura". For most of his life, they'd been cherry blossoms, these trees with their branches looking fluffy with their flowers. Goergous things, when you looked at them. A heck of a nuisance, when you didn't. All around the place...  
  
But he'd had a lot of free time a couple years ago, and not much he could do to fill it except read. And he had, widely, strangely, from Japanese poetry to novels to Star Trek books to comic books to baseball history and almost everything in between. Of course, the Japanese poetry hadn't been in Japanese at the time; he hadn't been that crazy.  
  
But he had been starting to flirt with the idea when they finally let him work again...  
  
And for some reason, from then on, he'd always thought of the trees as sakura. Maybe 'cause it was a pretty name; he didn't know.  
  
It was a pretty name, and it was a pretty tree...  
  
All the trees, he thought he'd heard they'd been, like, given to them by Japan a while back, and that made sense. The Japanese people were generally obsessed with sakura trees, like they were obsessed with schoolgirls, and giant monsters attacking Tokyo. Pretty obsessive people. Possibly, if he and everyone weren't such loudmouths, they'd fit right in. 'Cept maybe President Bartlet, who you couldn't really imagine fitting in anywhere, except maybe where he was.  
  
There was something about geese... 'cause they came down for winter and left before they could see the flowers bloom, everyone thought it was weird...  
  
And something else, Josh thought, watching the wind blow away the petals. Something about how quickly the flowers fall...  
  
Stars, in between the sakura petals. Not many, and he's not sure if any of them aren't planes, but it looks pretty...  
  
And peaceful, maybe that explained it...  
  
A phrase he picked up from somewhere drifted through his head: "Where are you going, where have you been?" Dr. Seuss? He didn't know; it could be Dr. Seuss or Shakespeare or a comic book or that girl who had probably been a lesbian in tenth grade, sometimes he'd seen some of her poems when he was trying to copy her homework. It was really annoying when she didn't take it out, just scribbled in that notebook... Except she'd done that less and less, because she knew...  
  
God, that girl had helped him through so many classes. Not that he couldn't have done it himself; it was just a bad year...  
  
A bad year... A bad few years. Josh closed his eyes.  
  
"Sometimes," Leo had told him Sam had said, "we're nowhere."  
  
Stuck in nowhere, as if nowhere was thick like syrup and quicksand, but more like quicksand, because the more you struggle, the longer you break free, the faster and deeper it sucks you down again...  
  
And eventually, you get tired of the tiny, ambiguous half-victories, and you stop struggling...  
  
Was that what he was doing?  
  
The lights of the city, that blur out the light of the stars...  
  
And then there was music, which surprised him. It wasn't the music itself, though; it was the fact it wasn't 'Ave Maria', or Christmas music, or anything orchestral, which he'd expected to hear in his head for several minutes now. He concentrated, trying to figure out what it was.  
  
"One of these dreams," Don Henley sang, and Josh recognised it instantly. One of his talents.  
  
One of these lost and lonely dreams... he thought, with the song.  
  
My God, this is all a dream, he thought hazily...  
  
"My God," a voice echoed. "Are you--"  
  
Something passed in front of Josh's vision, blotting out the sakura. He squinted, annoyed, and tried to bat the idiot away, but somehow... couldn't quite do it.  
  
"I've been searching for the daughter of the devil himself," Josh heard. "I've been searching for an angel in white."  
  
Joanie, he thought hazily; probably the Eagles would have been one of the few bands they could compromise on. Because she was a sucker for harmonies, just as he fell hard for a good guitar...  
  
"I've been waiting for a woman who's a little of both,  
And I can feel her but she's nowhere in sight..."  
  
The annoying guy had left again, Josh thought, smug. Good.  
  
"Oooh," came one of those harmonies that Joanie would have grudgingly loved, "Lonliness will blind you, in between the wrong and the right..."  
  
"Please, just freaking get here!"  
  
"Oooh, coming right behind you,  
Swear I'm gonna find you one of these nights..."  
  
A dream, Josh thought. It had to be. It suddenly made sense now. None of this could actually happen, should actually happen. And it was getting dreary, and awful, with that slow, miserable, impatient feeling you got when a dream was frustrating enough that you slowly started to wake out of it...  
  
One of these lost and lonely dreams...  
  
Was he really going to wake up now? Find whatever he was looking for? He'd thought he'd been chasing the real thing, he'd thought he'd found it, and he had, hadn't he?  
  
But it wasn't all he'd thought it would be, because there was something else he had been looking for... He couldn't imagine what, except he could, of course he could, he'd figured out lying to yourself was bad when he got stuck in a room with a shrink and a dippy student thing on Christmas Eve...  
  
Lonliness will blind you...  
  
Could you really--just wake up-- just by wishing it? Just say, I'm ready to leave now, and be whisked away to whatever reality was out there?  
  
Because there was another reality... Somewhere... beyond this... He was pretty sure...  
  
Was he going there? He was suddenly a little afraid. What would there be, what would he leave behind?  
  
Which was really more important?  
  
And the compelling, vageuly disco background of "One of These Nights" faded, gave way, to sirens and the "Ave Maria", like he'd known it would, eventually. Back to fighting, back to living and dying, back to thinking about what had happened, how he'd been thrown here after the crash, how he knew what bleeding to death felt like and was pretty sure he was feeling it again...  
  
The last time he couldn't feel anything like this, nothing good had come of it...  
  
He'd always fought, always fought everything, and what good had come of that, either? What good had really come of--any of it?  
  
Words, the muffled flashes of the sirens striking the sakura blossoms like a blow. Red and white lights.  
  
Donna, fifty years ago: "I wouldn't stop for red lights."  
  
Sam, even before that, muffled by time, phone lines, and alcohol: "And they all know what to do, they say they don't, but they're doing something, so that counts, 'cause I can't even do anything, I can't do anything anymore, Josh, and I was really good on the morning shows, and..."  
  
Josh sighed, quietly. The people were asking him things; he ignored them.  
  
"See, when you die, there can't be any light, any peace," a drunken philosophy major in Josh's fan club had told him, seriously. "'Cause if there were, what would induce anyone to walk away from it?"  
  
"And some of them are treating you like they know you can be broken, and Leo and CJ are trying desperately, painfully, almost, to take you for granted again--you must have noticed-- and I can't do either, I can't go either way, and I just wanted to make sure you were still there, because you have to be, Josh, you have to be."  
  
For the first time, he realized consciously that the damage control he'd been in after Rosslyn hadn't been for him. Not because he was breakable. Because everyone else was.  
  
Because he had to be there.  
  
"Seriously," the drunken philosophy student had said, "what kind of idiot would you have to be?"  
  
He sighed again, hunkering down, even as his heart fluttered and his vision went blurrier. It sucked. It never changed. There was no reason for him to go back.  
  
Except maybe this time, he could remember long enough what he'd learned.  
  
The important things...  
  
One more battle. Play the game, one more time. Focus, don't let yourself drag down. Going down without fighting is no way to go. It's what you are, Joshua Lyman, it's what you've always been, and as much as you hate yourself for it, you're a fighter.  
  
You're a smartass and a dumb brat and you're arrogant and you're foolish and you're stubborn and you're angry and you're a compulsive fixer and you carry around so much guilt about everyone you love dying that it clouds your vision at times like these and you deserve to live and there is something left out there and you're a stubborn asshole and you're not going down like this, no matter what it costs you, you're not going down like this...  
  
Defeated, Josh started to fight.  
  



End file.
